A New York appeals court on Wednesday, September 4, confirmed that the Internet Archive must stop lending digital books on a large scale without properly compensating their authors, upholding the initial ruling of March 2023 against which the association had refused to appeal.
Best known for the Wayback Machine – a massive web page archiving service – the Internet Archive also hosts copies of other types of documents, including millions of books, which it offers for consultation through a digital lending service. In March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced many libraries to close, it launched an operation called the “National Emergency Library”, removing the limitation that prevented the same book from being consulted simultaneously by several people.
Three months later, four publishers filed a complaint against these loans granted without their authorization: HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, Penguin Random House, as well as Hachette Book Group, a subsidiary of Hachette Livre France. During the hearings, Internet Archive explained that its non-commercial service was part of the American doctrine known as fair use, which provides for exemptions to intellectual property in the context of facilitating the dissemination of ideas. An argument rejected successively by the court of first instance and then by the court of appeal.
Another complaint filed by record labels
The truth is that this ruling may not definitively close the procedure. “We are currently reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend libraries’ rights to own, lend and preserve books. », said Chris Freeland, director of library services at the Internet Archive, to the Associated Press, raising the possibility of a Supreme Court case.
At the same time, the Internet Archive is being sued by six record companies, including Sony and Universal, who accuse it of illegally hosting several thousand copyrighted songs and recordings. At the heart of the complaint: the Big 78 Project, a community program that aims to enable artists to access and share their music. « preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records » over a period from 1898 to the 1950s, in particular by allowing collectors to post online digitized versions of physical copies they owned. Artists named in the complaint include Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis.
In May 2024, a court refused to dismiss this lawsuit. In July, lawyers from both sides joined forces to resolve the matter amicably, according to the outlet. Digital music news.
